Vukosi Marivate

thumb|Vukosi Marivate at Wikimania 2025 in NairobiVukosi Marivate (born in Ga-Rankuwa, South Africa) is a South African computer scientist who holds the ABSA-UP Chair of Data Science and serves as Professor of Computer Science at the University of Pretoria (UP). He is known for his pioneering work in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), especially in natural language processing (NLP) for African and other low-resource languages. He is a co-founder of the Deep Learning Indaba, Lelapa AI, the Masakhane Research Foundation, and leads the Data Science for Social Impact research group at UP. Quotes If you use the internet and apps, they work on automated decision making based on what’s there, and they’ve been doing that for decades, so AI is not something new. The question we need to be asking from this story is What kind of information is inside these systems? They can be used to connect us and build and improve our worlds, but at the same time, they can be very scary and can be used to drive hate. We need to understand that if we don’t have controls, or don’t understand what is really going on, AI just becomes some of us, it can be used for nefarious means, and doesn’t represent our ideals, our values, and the things that we want in our societies. Representation matters in building these AI systems, if we don’t build in what we want, then they don’t represent us. At TEDxPretoria, UP’s Prof. Vukosi Marivate highlighted the need to develop deep African roots in AI to support and advance African languages External links Category:Living people Category:Computer scientists from South Africa